LUCK OF THE DEVILLUCK OF THE DEVIL
GERMANY’S GENERALS DID NOT WANT TO WIDEN THE WAR. ON 5 November, the army commander in chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, tried to present the military’s pessimism to Hitler. Flustered by the Führer’s proximity, Brauchitsch did not get far. “When I confront this man,” he once said of Hitler, “I feel as if someone were choking me and I cannot find another word.”1
Brauchitsch had prepared a paper on the attack plan. Troop morale could not sustain a new offensive, he warned. In Poland, officers had lost control of enlisted men, who staged “drunken orgies” on troop trains. Court-martial reports described “mutinies.”2
Hitler erupted—dressing him down, Brauchitsch recalled, “as one would not do even to the stupidest recruit.” Even the secretaries outside heard his tirade. Which units lacked discipline? Where? He would fly there tomorrow to enforce the death sentences. No, Hitler screamed, the troops would fight; only their leaders worried him. How could they condemn the whole army because of a few excesses? “Not one frontline commander mentioned any lack of attacking spirit in the infantry to me. But now I have to listen to this, after the army has achieved a magnificent victory in Poland!”3
Brauchitsch offered to resign. Hitler shouted back that the general must do his duty like every other soldier. Alluding to the compound outside Berlin where the army general staff worked, Hitler warned that he would not ignore the defeatist “spirit of Zossen.” He cursed the army’s cowardice until he ran out of breath. Then he snatched Brauchitsch’s memo, tossed it in a safe, and stalked out of the room, slamming the door and leaving it to echo in the great hall.4
Brauchitsch staggered out. Army chief of staff Franz Halder, waiting for him in the anteroom, recalled Brauchitsch emerging “chalk-white and with twisted countenance,” incoherent and terrified, choking between clenched teeth, “looking convulsed.” Brauchitsch related Hitler’s threat to crush defeatists. Had Hitler learned of their putsch plans? At any moment, the SS might descend on Zossen. No one had forgotten the Night of the Long Knives. Returning to headquarters, Halder ordered all coup-planning papers burned.5
It soon became clear that Hitler knew nothing of the plot. But Oster’s colleague Hans Gisevius warned Müller not to count on a renewed push by the generals. “They’re only playing chess with the people,” Gisevius said over beer at the Kaiserhof, just before Müller boarded a train back to Munich. “These gentleman riders will go right up to the hurdle, but never jump it!” He urged Müller not to oversell the military at the Vatican.6
IN ROME, ON 7 NOVEMBER, MÜLLER ENTERED FATHER LEIBER’S apartment at 13 Via Nicolo da Tolentino. Unlike the warm and blunt Kaas, Leiber—a whisper of a priest in a black soutane—revealed little of himself behind an enigmatic and worldly smile, born of long service in secret matters. Expressing concern that Pius had decided to join the plot, the Jesuit éminence gris schooled Müller in the rules of the game.7
Pius could not meet with Müller while the conspiracy unfolded. Hartl’s SS spies prowled the schools and rectories of papal Rome. What if one of them blew Müller’s cover? To retain plausible deniability, Pius must be able to say that he never met Müller during the plot. Instead, Müller would liaise with Pius through Father Leiber, their “common mouth.” Müller took these words, he later said, as a “gracious yet well-reasoned command.”
Finally, Pius wanted personal control of the channel between London and Berlin. He did not want to devolve responsibility in any way to the Church. The plotters could involve the Holy Father, but not the Holy See. The dynamic must have a plain symmetry: just as Hitler, not the German state, was the target of the plot, so Pius, not the Roman faith, would be its abettor. “Leiber said, by the order of the pope, that he requested that, when discussing the authority to convene the peace talks, they [the military conspirators] should cite the ‘pope’ and not the ‘Vatican,’” Müller recounted. “Because he himself [Pius] had made a point of drawing a clear distinction between the pope who, in a certain sense, was entitled and obligated to do everything for peace, and the Vatican, which had a more political status.” What might seem like scholastic hairsplitting to outsiders had a compelling logic to Pius. The German generals, and their prospective British interlocutors, were Protestants; they liked and trusted Pacelli, but retained a certain reserve toward the Roman Catholic Church, and especially toward the Vatican. Pius therefore felt it opportune to say, in essence: you people on both sides of the war know me; you know that I am reliable. For my part, I know that you have some misgivings or some problems with the Vatican as such. Let this delicate business then be done under my name, which you credit, rather than that of my institution, which you doubt. So that this proposal be taken seriously, whether it should succeed or fail, I offer my personal reputation as collateral. Strictly speaking, then, the intrigues that followed would not be the Church’s covert campaign against the Reich, but the pope’s secret war against Hitler.8
He took a personal interest in operational details, including code names. Müller would go by “Herr X.” Father Leiber, who taught at the Gregorian University, would use the handle “Gregor.” They would both call Pius the “Chief.” Müller asked Leiber whether the pope knew his own code name. “Of course,” said Leiber. “But isn’t it a little sacrilegious?” Müller asked. “How did he take it?” Leiber assured him that the Holy Father had only smiled, and had even seemed pleased. The code name “Chief” showed, he thought, that the pope returned the trust the plotters placed in him.9
WHILE MÜLLER SAT WITH LEIBER IN ROME, HITLER RODE IN HIS private train to Munich. Every year on 8 November he spoke at the Bürgerbräukeller, marking the anniversary of the 1923 beer-hall putsch. But he felt uneasy about the security risks involved in annual public appearances, believing an irregular routine the best safeguard against assassination.10
As Hitler arrived in Munich, his border police made an arrest. Georg Elser, a thirty-six-year-old Swabian watchmaker, had tried to cross illegally into Switzerland at Lake Constance. In his pockets police found a pair of pliers, pieces of a bomb fuse, and a picture-postcard of the Bürgerbräu’s interior. Concealed under his lapel the officers discovered a badge of the former “Red Front” Communist movement. Not until several days later would Elser tell SS interrogators why he had tried leave Germany that night. Knowing Hitler spoke every 8 November the beer hall, Elser had hidden a bomb there. He was not a member of the Canaris group. Elser worked alone. Nevertheless, he planned the attack expertly. He had taken a job at a quarry to steal donarit, an explosive with the properties he required. For thirty-five nights he managed to hide without detection in the hall. In the paneled column behind the dais, he cut a hole and then disguised it by making a door from a matching piece of paneling. Inside he placed a bomb improvised from a stolen 75-millimeter shell. On 5 November, Elser installed two Westminster clocks, cased in cork to muffle the ticking.11
At eight o’clock, Hitler entered the beer hall. Three thousand Nazis cheered as he stepped to the flag-draped platform. When the room hushed, Hitler spoke for only one hour, instead of his usual three. He excoriated England. London would soon learn: “We National Socialists have always been fighters. This is a great time. And in it, we shall prove ourselves all the more as fighters.” Afterward he greeted the party officials who thronged forward. Some in the audience sat around drinking; others filed out of the hall.12
Eight minutes later, at 9:20 p.m. the pillar behind the podium vanished in white flame. The blast hurled tables and flung party veterans to the floor. Beams from the collapsed roof crushed to death eight people and injured more than sixty, including the father of Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun. The beer-hall proprietor recalled “a tremendous explosion, which caused the ceiling to fall and crash with a terrific roar. There were screams and the air was filled with dust and an acrid smell. Bodies lay under the debris and there was a great struggle as the injured tried to struggle free and the uninjured tried to find a way out.”13
Hitler had left the building eight minutes earlier. He had already boarded his train back to Berlin when the word spread to his coach that something had happened. At Nuremburg station, the facts filtered through. Hitler declared it “a miracle” that he had been spared, a “sure sign” that Providence favored his mission. The incident also showed, as his adjutant wrote, “that Hitler had enemies who would go to any lengths to get rid of him.”14
JOSEF MÜLLER SPENT THE EVENING OF 8 NOVEMBER IN ROME. HE was sitting with Monsignor Johannes Schönhöffer, in the offices of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, when news came that Hitler had survived a bombing attempt. “An Italian and a French priest in the room with us stared at me inquiringly,” Müller remembered. The looks suggested that Müller had at least established his “cover” as an agent of dissident Germans. He himself wondered whether his friends had planted the bomb.15
Four days later, in Berlin, Müller found his comrades in confusion. The bombing had totally surprised Oster’s group. As far as they could glean, Elser was a lone-wolf communist. Because he worked alone, no one could betray him; the SS had virtually no way to penetrate his plot. If Hitler had not inexplicably shortened his speech, Elser’s bomb would have killed him. Not for the last time, Müller found himself thinking that Hitler had “the luck of the Devil.”16
The Bürgerbräu incident wrecked Erich Kordt’s plan. Late in the afternoon of 11 November, he went to Oster’s home to get the bomb he meant to use that evening. Though Hitler had postponed his western offensive, citing weather reasons, Kordt remained determined to strike. Oster met him with the sad words: “I am unable to give you the explosive.” After the bombing, party police had placed all munitions depots, including the Abwehr’s, under surveillance. Kordt said softly: “Then it will have to be tried with a pistol.” Oster grew agitated. “Kordt, do not commit an act of insanity. You do not have one chance in a hundred. You cannot see Hitler alone. And in the anteroom in the presence of adjutants, orderlies and visitors you would hardly get a chance to shoot.”17
THE MUNICH BOMBING DISTURBED THE POPE’S MEN. MONSIGNOR Kaas found it “inexplicable,” an “enigma,” especially because Müller could relate only the Abwehr’s conjectures. Kaas thought the Nazis themselves might have staged the attack, as they allegedly did the Reichstag fire, for their own ends. That no one seemed to regard the event as astonishing or abnormal showed, Kaas thought, that Hitler and Stalin had made gangsterism a generally accepted state of affairs.
In Berlin, the papal nuncio carried an envelope to the Foreign Ministry. The pope’s secretariat of state relayed congratulations to the Führer for surviving the attempt on his life. Hitler doubted the pope’s sincerity.
“He would much rather have seen the plot succeed,” Hitler told dinner guests soon after. Polish governor Hans Frank protested that Pius had always proved a good friend to Germany. Hitler said, “That’s possible but he’s no friend of mine.”18
THE FAILED ASSASSINATION HAD ONE GOOD RESULT FOR THE PLOTTERS. It excited the British about regime change. Josef Müller’s messages through Vatican channels gained credibility. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had said that for London to support anti-Nazis, “Germany must do some deed as evidence of good faith.” Now a German had done a deed. The day after the bombing, therefore, the British sent two spies to meet a German officer, who promised to detail a plan to remove Hitler and end the war.19
They met at the Dutch-German border town of Venlo. The British officers, Payne Best and Richard Stevens, did not know the true name of the man they would meet. They knew him only by the code-name “Schaemel.”
A SENTRY RAISED THE BARRIER AND THE BRITISH DROVE INTO no-man’s-land. Only a few trees fringed a customs house and a café. Schaemel emerged on the café’s porch just as the gate on the German side rose. He waved to indicate an all-well.20
Without warning, a car shot through the German gate. SS officers on the running boards leveled machine-pistols at the Englishmen. Schaemel ordered Best and Stevens out of their car. Their Dutch driver, Dirk Klop, drew his revolver and ran away, shooting at the SS as he went. The Germans returned fire, and Klop fell dead into a row of trees. Schaemel disarmed Best and Stevens and marched them into Germany.21
The British had fallen into a Nazi trap. An SS intelligence officer, Walter Schellenberg, had posed as an oppositional general—Schaemel—to feed the British disinformation. After the beer-hall bombing, Himmler saw a chance to rally Germans around Hitler by claiming that Elser had worked for British intelligence. He ordered Schellenberg to arrest the British agents and declare them Elser’s handlers. The Nazis hoped thereby to stir popular support for an attack in the West, while discrediting any true resistance in Allied eyes. They failed in the first goal, but succeeded in the second: London became reflexively skeptical about alleged plots to remove Hitler.22
The Venlo affair also dismayed the Vatican. On 21 November the British ambassador to the Holy See, D’Arcy Osborne, cabled London after speaking with Monsignor Kaas. The Vatican crypt keeper seemed “friendly as ever,” and made clear his hatred of Hitler and his Nazi regime. But “Kaas took a very gloomy view” about the prospects for regime change. Germans were “by nature subservient,” and, after long regimentation, almost incapable of organizing a revolt. They remained mostly united behind Hitler, even though many deplored Nazi principles and methods. The success of the campaign against the hated Poles had dazzled even critics of the regime. The Nazis had stunned and battered the rest into acquiescence.
Osborne appreciated Kaas’s realism. Hoping to keep the Vatican channel open, he asked London to keep his talk with Kaas confidential. The monsignor’s name should “on no account be mentioned.” Sensing that Kaas had resistance contacts deep within Germany, Osborne urged his Foreign Office superiors to pursue any leads the Vatican offered, pending proof that they would not lead Britain into “another Venloo” [sic].23
Josef Müller spent the second half of November seeking that proof in Berlin. He found it hard to come by. Army Chief of Staff Franz Halder supported the coup planners, but remained paralyzed by Hitler’s vow to vanquish “the spirit of Zossen.” Müller heard from Hans Rattenhuber, the head of Hitler’s bodyguard, of increased security-patrols in the chancellery gardens, a new command post outside Hitler’s rooms. Partly for that reason, Kaas told Osborne that a “numbed fatalism” afflicted the conspirators. Then the picture changed again. The plotters’ situation went from gloomy to catastrophic. An SS spy had uncovered the pope’s role in the plot.24